A while back the Mozilla Foundation launched Plugin Check, a webpage were users could go and check to see if their Adobe Flash Player plugin is up-to-date. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation enhanced the functionality provided by the Plugin Check webpage so that it could check a lot more plugins. The reasoning behind this decision is quite simple: old plugins can cause the browser to crash, can make the browser become unstable, and pose a security risk as they can be exploited by people with malicious intent.

“Our web team has just pushed the full plugin check page live, checking the status of more than 15 popular plugins, with more still in the works. Visitors to the page can see which plugins they have installed and, for any that are outdated, follow an easy link to the update site. In the upcoming release of Firefox 3.6, we’ll also include built-in support for helping users keep up to date. When you visit a page with Firefox 3.6, we’ll use this same service to let you know if any of the plugins used on the site have updates available,” explained Mozilla Security’s Jonathan Nightingale at the time.

Advertising

October is almost over now, so how’s Plugin Check fairing? Has it been a tremendous success? Has it helped Firefox users update their plugins? The simple answer is YES. Plugin Check has helped quite a few Firefox users update their plugins. Here are the numbers the Mozilla Metrics team released:

Page views: 459,000 Visits: 10,000 Clicks on “action” links: 218,000

“Considering that this page hasn’t been directly pushed to users, these numbers are significant. There are a couple spots within mozilla.com where users can click to find this page, but otherwise, our web analytics reporting tells us that about 90% of the traffic has been coming from news and technology related web sites,” explained Mozilla’s Ken Kovash. You can visit Mozilla’s Plugin Check webpage here.

With the blockbuster movie season upon us, Sony decided to celebrate the occasion with a sale: the Attack of the Blockbusters Sale that offers discounts of up to 50% (60% if you’re a PlayStation Plus member) on a ton of PS4 video games.

Samsung’s new T5 portable solid-state drive (PSSD) uses the latest 64-layer V-NAND technology, offers between 250GB and 2TB of storage capacity, has a lightweight and shock-resistant design that’s smaller than the average business card, and delivers industry-leading transfer speeds of up to 540 MB/s.